


copingcetic

by constellatory



Category: Persona 4
Genre: Angst, Gen, Mostly introspection, and a bunch of music, i guess?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-14
Updated: 2016-01-14
Packaged: 2018-05-13 22:20:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,455
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5719108
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/constellatory/pseuds/constellatory
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When he starts to crack under the weight of silence, he finds a way to cope. He has to. They all need him, after all. Coping is all he can do.</p>
            </blockquote>





	copingcetic

It wasn’t that he didn’t notice. In fact, it was quite the opposite. Yu had always been observant, after all. Watching people, being the canniest possible observer of hearts, had been his greatest strength. If he closed his eyes he could open himself, it sometimes felt, to the entire world; if he cupped his hands over his ears, he could hear every heartbeat in Inaba, every murmur and every wish. Looking into the eyes of the people that he knew, all his friends and precious bonds, always told him the things their words did not even when they didn’t want him to know. And always, secretly, they did want him to know after all. Hearts cried out. They wanted to be accepted. He understood that too, intuitively, and was always there, waiting, listening.

To witness the careful averted looks of his friends now, to hear their cut off murmurs as he drew close on the roof, to see the grim lines their mouths made when he glanced over his shoulder at them as they fought their bitter way through Heaven...

How could he do anything but notice how careful they were being of him, as if he might break at the slightest application of pressure? All he could do was return the favor by pretending he didn’t see it. Yu kept his head down and fought. And fought. And fought. And went to clubs. And made his friends lunch. And studied. And went to his jobs. And visited his uncle in the hospital.

It was Naoto who quietly and gently pointed out one day that he had dark circles beneath his eyes, and that he was a bit pale, and to inquire if he’d been getting enough rest. Yu told her with a firmness that made some of the girls flinch and some of the guys stare down at their shoes that he was perfectly fine, and they were once again going straight into the TV World after school. Just as they’d done every day since Nanako had been kidnapped.

They were all tired to the bone. Injuries were racking up. Close calls were coming thicker and faster as exhaustion started to dog all their steps like a sticky, sickly shadow that grew only longer as Yu’s desperation burned hotter. Even their leader, normally so calm, normally so unflappable, now so rattled, knew he couldn’t keep this up. They were all hovering just at the edge of completely burning out.

Even as he forced them all towards that precipice, Yu was also the only force holding them all back. It was a careful balancing act, twice as taxing as anything else he had to exactingly manage right now.

He coped. He managed it by coping.

Every evening, after they all spilled out of the TV too tired to even murmur goodbyes, they’d all split off. Teddie and Yosuke would support each other home, Yosuke exhausted to the point of not caring that he was being seen leaning on the bear with one of Teddie’s stubby little arms reaching around him, nor that he had an arm around Ted’s back in return, comforting and steadying. Yukiko and Chie would often excuse themselves in the same way, leaning on each other shoulder to shoulder, pinky fingers tangled as they tried to work up the energy to head their separate ways. Naoto and Kanji had the stiffest upper lips of the group next to Yu, Naoto’s small frame ever unbent no matter how tired she got, though Kanji would always pause to lean down and give her a look of concern anyway. Naoto would give him one of her quiet, gentle smiles in return, and they’d part ways, Kanji with his shoulders hunched and hands in his pockets and a little bit more of a spring in his step, like he hadn’t just spent several hours getting whipped by brutally dangerous Shadows. Rise would sometimes linger, surprisingly tough in her own way, casting a concerned look behind her as she hurried to catch up with Naoto.

Yu would always depart last, certain to see his friends off and make sure they were safely on their way before winding his slow way home. He had ulterior motives for his dawdling, of course.

The house was so quiet.

He barely spent any time downstairs at the moment. There was never any TV on when he came home anymore. No calls home with a gruff voice on the other end yet again explaining away a late night. It felt like pointless busy work to ghost into the kitchen and prepare a meal, necessary though he knew it was.

It was so quiet in the house.

Though he’d always felt ambivalent about the TV’s constant noise before, Yu now found he craved sound. The sheer enormity of the silence threatened to grind him to dust the very first night he spent in the house without either Nanako or his uncle. The very first day after the kidnapping, Yu had approached Yosuke with fine cracks of weary-eyed panic in his calm mask and asked if his friend had an extra set of headphones to spare.

Yosuke had looked suitably alarmed, and rushed to assure his partner he’d find something. Yosuke had proceeded to disappear _during lunch,_ regardless of the total idiocy of doing so, and came back just before the start of next class with his hair and uniform in utter disarray and his cheeks flushed from exertion and a pair of sleek black over-ear headphones in his hand.

"Keep them," he’d said in response to Yu’s stunned silence, which Yosuke had correctly read as gratitude and answered with a wink and one of his disarming grins. "I never use 'em anymore anyway."

Yu had a music player, though before now he’d barely used it. He usually preferred to work in silence. He liked the natural sounds of Inaba. The quiet sounds of the wind or even drizzling rain, portentous as that tended to be. Full-throated cicadas singing in summer, crickets in the slow tumble towards autumn, and the sighs of the ice coating the world in the winter were all their own kind of lullaby that he liked to listen to as he studied or read books or folded envelopes.

Now, though, all of it was unbearable. Too quiet. The silence gave him too much space for his thoughts, left his mind feeling too wide, a yawning space begging to be filled with only all the lack the house could provide.

On these nights, Yu would slip Yosuke’s - no, his, now - headphones onto his head, and plug them into his music player. He didn’t pay much attention to exactly _what_ music he cued up. It just needed to be dense, an aural wall that could block out anything complex. Nothing soft, nothing gentle, nothing that invited contemplation or reflection. Nothing too cheerful or too somber. And then he’d crank up the sound, gripping onto each headphone with both hands as he sank to the floor and shut his eyes, his bone-weariness overtaking him all at once as he sagged against the edge of his couch.

He’d sit there and let the music soak into his every muscle fiber, his every nerve, his every synapse, until he was reasonably confident that the silence wouldn’t devour him once he took the headphones off again.

That’s when he’d push himself up, sometimes with a stumble he was glad no one could see, and get back to work. He’d sit at his desk and do his homework, or sit at his table and work on whatever one of his jobs might demand of him. Even while he did this, he’d keep the headphones looped around his neck and let the music keep playing. This was the real reason he wasn’t getting much sleep. Sometimes he spent so much time sitting on the floor losing himself to music that he was going to sleep far, far later than he should have been. But if he didn’t take the time to drown the silence out, he thought he’d go insane. Being sleepless was better than being ... whatever the alternative was. He couldn’t quite put words to it, and wasn’t sure he wanted to be able to.

It took about a week before they rescued Nanako. Even then the house remained empty, as then she had to stay in the hospital. If anything, the silence got worse. Finals arrived. The stress intensified.

And Yu continued to cope, curled up in a pile of thin long limbs and shivery stress on the floor of his two-degrees-too-cool room, telling himself in whispered words the same things he’d tell his friends much more confidently in the light of day:

_It’ll be alright._

**Author's Note:**

> The title is a mashup of the words "coping" and "copacetic."
> 
> I wish I could claim I was original in saying that [this](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rxt7TexggGE) is the type of song Yu was listening to, but I actually drew the inspiration for it from a different series of fics I happened to be reading earlier tonight. Go check out the [Truth in Someone Else](http://archiveofourown.org/series/87454) series, it's great.
> 
> You'll notice that the usage of the song in that fic and this actually have nothing in common, but it does have a "wall of sound" quality that I like and find kind of right for the idea here. But if you prefer, [here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X_LXPbfJM48) [are](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4LCgW2-bPEY) [some](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fY6R3sSVoG4) [alternatives](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iBOiaGPA6Wc). Enjoy.


End file.
